"We will eradicate Twitter," Erdoğan told a rally in Bursa in the west of the country. "I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic." There are roughly 10 million Twitter users based in Turkey.
To drive the point home, Erdoğan added: "Twitter, mwitter!" — although there appears to be some dispute about how to translate that — it's either a "semantically empty phrase" or an indication that Erdoğan will shut down Twitter and similar websites.
What happened next was no laughing matter. The Prime Minister's office issued a statement saying that Turkish officials had "no option" other than to ban Twitter, according to Reuters.
Shortly afterwards, tweets and screenshots began to show that Twitter (and possibly also Facebook) was being blocked in Turkey, as of 4:30pm ET:
At 11:30pm the turkish government has blocked access to twitter. #Turkey #Censorship
— RedHackEditor ★ (@RedHackEditor) 20 Maret 2014
I'm told that the Twitter ban is slowly being rolled out in Turkey. Will update when I know more. https://t.co/AhMy4gdOU0
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) 20 Maret 2014
Many Twitter users were sharing a forum on Wikileaks with advice on how Turkish Twitter users can still access the site.
Twitter told Mashable it was investigating claims that its service is blocked. Meanwhile its governmental division responded by posting this tweet — once in English, and again in Turkish:
Turkish users: you can send Tweets using SMS. Avea and Vodafone text START to 2444. Turkcell text START to 2555.
— Policy (@policy) 20 Maret 2014
"#TwitterisblockedinTurkey" and "#DictatorErdogan" were the top trending hashtags worldwide on Twitter by Thursday afternoon.
Erdoğan appears to have made use of a recent and highly controversial law, passed by the Turkish Parliament, that allows the government's Telecommunications Board to "shut down" websites based on anything it judges to be "privacy violations." Two weeks ago, he also threatened to shut down Facebook and YouTube.
"Some known circles immediately rebelled against this Internet law," Erdoğan said in a TV interview on March 6. "We are determined we won’t let the Turkish people be sacrificed to YouTube and Facebook." He claimed that "those people [the social media services] incite any kind of immorality or espionage for the profit of these institutions."
Erdoğan has been down on social media ever since the summer of 2013, when protesters filled Taksim Square in Istanbul to complain about the closure of a local park and were met by police with tear gas. The Prime Minster described Twitter as a "troublemaker" that helped organize those protests.
In February, he claimed that Twitter bots or as he put it, a "robot lobby" were targeting the government.
"The robot lobby that they set up on social media hits with tweets," Erdoğan told parliament on Feb. 25. "They tell them to increase the number of tweets." This was around the same time that a number of phone calls were leaked online, purporting to show the corrupt dealings of Erdoğan's government.
Twitter has been shutting down fake accounts based in Turkey, according to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily.
Erdoğan's words stand in stark contrast to those of the Turkish President Abdullah Gül, a prominent social media user. "The closure of them is out of the question," Gül told reporters in response to the earlier threats against Facebook and YouTube. "Both are very important platforms. We always take a pride in enlarging freedoms."
Meanwhile, it was announced Thursday that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo would receive this year's PEN award for contributions to "digital freedom".
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